Wednesday, April 02, 2014

Islamizing Britain’s Schools

Littleton Green Community School, Huntington, England“Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.“
– Jesuit aphorism

Real Muslims understand the critical importance of teaching the young. The critical importance, that is, of teaching them the “right” things and not teaching them the “wrong” things. The most important single element of stealth Islamization is the effort to convert Western schools from centers of secular education into hubs of Islamic indoctrination. Fortunately, there are plenty of dhimmi teachers and school administrators eager to help out, convinced that they’re serving the interests of multicultural peace and harmony. These days, for some reason, this form of dhimmitude seems to be most prevalent – and to take its acutest form – in England.
Take, for example, Lynn Small, headmistress of a state elementary school in Huntington, England, who last November wrote a letter to parents of fourth- and sixth-grade students warning that if they didn’t let their children attend an “Explore Islam” workshop at Staffordshire University, a “Racial Discrimination” note would be placed in the kids’ permanent records. Fortunately, parents kicked up a fuss, and the media took notice, and Small backtracked – kind of – while still insisting that since some of the school’s “pupils and teachers…belong to the Islam faith,” it was only “right for the children to understand and appreciate their faith as well as their own.”

Obviously, Small realized she’d miscalculated. Slightly. Apparently there were no repercussions for her. She still has her job, and there’s no indication that school authorities even put a note in her permanent record chiding her for making Stalinist-type threats against parents. No, her heart was plainly in the right place, as far as the British educational establishment is concerned – she just went about things the wrong way, confronting parents directly instead of taking a more crafty approach.

In any event, Small, it turns out, is decidedly small-time. In the last couple of weeks, investigations by the Telegraph and Daily Mail have uncovered something far more serious than Small’s little workshop: namely, a long-term, broad-based conspiracy to Islamize schools in the city of Birmingham. The conspiracy is so widespread, and involves so many high-level people in the school system and the Muslim community, that – well, put it this way: if you were to suggest to a typical European multiculturalist that any such plot were brewing anywhere in the Western world, you’d be mocked and reviled, accused of racism, paranoia, and sheer unadulterated foolishness.

Yet the facts are there. As revealed in a seriesofarticles, there’s “an organised group of Muslim teachers, education consultants, school governors and activists” who are involved in what they themselves call a “Trojan Horse” campaign to further an “Islamising agenda” by “remov[ing] secular head teachers and install[ing] Islamic practices in Birmingham state schools.” The participants’ ongoing discussions of this campaign have taken place on a private online message board, whose contents have been seen by the Telegraph. Among the conspirators’ short-term objectives is to install Muslim worship in the schools; their explicit long-term goal, as they have made clear in postings on the message board, is the total Islamization of Britain.

The key figure in this scheme is Razwan Faraz, a deputy head teacher at a Birmingham school who, in the days before the Telegraph exposé, had made something of a name for himself by vociferously denying that any such effort was underway. Faraz has another claim to fame, as it happens: his brother, Ahmed Faraz, was the owner of a shop in Birmingham, since closed by police, that “distributed extremist literature to many involved in terror plots, including one of the 7/7 bombers.” Ahmed was himself jailed in 2011 “for multiple terror-related offences.” Razwan assailed his brother’s incarceration as “an attack on free speech.”

Among Faraz’s collaborators are a number of Muslims in positions of local power. Many belong to the Muslim Parents Association and/or the al-Hijrah Trust, groups that work actively, and openly, to increase the Islamic influence in British schools. A leading member of the conspiracy, Tahir Alam, is a senior figure at the Muslim Council of Britain and is vice-chair of the Association of Muslim Schools – and that’s not all. If parents’ complaints about the efforts to Islamize their kids’ schools have been ignored repeatedly, it may be at least in part because Alam is also an official school inspector for Ofsted (the government agency responsible for such matters) as well as a“specialist in school governance” for the Birmingham city council (whose leader, a fellow named Sir Albert Bore, has rejected the “Trojan Horse” charges as “defamatory” and insists that Birmingham schools are doing just fine).

The conspirators appear to be a patient lot. About a newly appointed Muslim school head, one participant in the message board wrote: “Please don’t pressurise her to start the Islamising agenda first. That will be a lot easier when she is respected as leader. She has to establish herself with minimum controversy for the first six months, and lead the people to believe in her before they believe in her policies.”

The results of these people’s efforts speak for themselves. At one school, Park View, which has been praised by Prime Minister David Cameron for its purported “educational excellence, a senior teacher who publicly eulogized terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki is now in the running to become head teacher. “Extremist preachers” have addressed school assemblies; girls have been pressured to cover their hair; £70,000 was spent on loudspeakers to summon students to Friday prayer. “It felt like a faith school. Islam permeated everything,” one source “close to the investigation” told the Telegraph. “All the citizenship teaching was about being a good Muslim.” All this, mind you, at a nominally secular state school.

Then there’s Oldknow, a primary school where an excellent, non-Muslim head teacher was driven out “by a concerted campaign to remove her and Islamise her school.” Oldknow now has Muslim prayers every Friday and has organized at least three taxpayer-funded school trips to Mecca. Arabic classes are compulsory for all pupils. The school even has its own madrassah. Teachers engage in “blatant belittling of Christianity.” Sources spoke about teachers who introduce religion into “every lesson” and whose insistence that music is sinful has led some children to refuse to take music classes. Last December, the school’s traditional Christmas tree and pantomime were cancelled because they were adjudged “un-Islamic,” and a teacher gave a talk at which he led students in a chant: “Do we believe in Christmas? No! Do we give out Christmas cards? No! The seven days of Christmas, they [Christians] can’t even count!”
Things aren’t as far along yet at another school, Springfield, where the non-Muslim head teacher, according to his colleagues, is “under ‘non-stop attack’ by radical members of the governing body” and has received anonymous death threats and had his tires slashed. Meanwhile, at a fourth school, Anderton Park, where the governing body recently voted to “Islamize” collective worship, “the lives of successive non-Muslim head teachers have been made a ‘misery’ by radical religious governors and parents determined to stop the teaching of PE and music, regarded as sinful by hardline Muslims.” At Anderdon Park, there were also several “assaults on staff” (no details provided).

In response to the accounts of the “Trojan Horse” conspiracy laid out in the Telegraph and Daily Mail, Alam complained that he was – what else? – the target of an Islamophobic witch hunt. For his part, Michael White, a former teacher at Park View, had blistering words for the British government and for the Birmingham city council, saying that both were so “afraid to upset communities” that they chose “to sweep things under the carpet.” (Note that even White felt a need to avoid spelling out which “communities” the authorities were loath to offend.)

Sajeel Shaid and the Ad-Deen Primary School

Birmingham, of course, isn’t the only locality in Britain where children are being subjected to Islamic indoctrination in the guise of education. The other day the Daily Mailreported that one Sajeel Shahid, who has trained terrorists – including “the ringleader of the 7/7 terrorist bombings” and four persons who tried to blow up a Kent shopping center and a London nightclub – has for several years been running the Ad-Deen Primary School, a Muslim institution in Essex, whose pupils are between three and eleven years old. Because he ran the school under a pseudonym, inspectors didn’t see anything fishy about the version of Islam being taught to his charges, and accordingly gave the school passing grades. Of course they did: the only difference between the version of Islam taught at approved Islamic schools and the version preached by Islamic terrorists is the terrorism itself.

British parents owe a debt of gratitude to the Telegraph and Daily Mail for uncovering these repulsive stories – and owe no debt at all to their spineless elected officials, both national and local, or to school authorities, who, if it were up to them, would presumably have been content to see Islam overrun the country’s classrooms, all the while ridiculing the very concept of stealth Islamization as hysterical bigotry.

Then there’s the Guardian, the proud flagship of the British left. On March 7, over a week before the Telegraph began to report the results of its investigation, the Guardian, which had come into possession of a letter outlining the Trojan Horse conspirators’ activities, summed up the whole business in an article whose headline led with the word “alleged,” whose subhead focused on Alam’s characterization of the charges as “a malicious fabrication and completely untrue,” and whose final sentences were devoted to a condemnation of the “alleged plot” by longtime Islamic activist Inayat Bunglawala, whom the Guardian carefully identified as “chair of Muslims4UK, a group which aims to promote active Muslim engagement in British society.”

Unlike the Telegraph, however, the Guardian apparently didn’t proceed to investigate the charges. Instead, it dutifully noted that the police and school officials were looking into them. And that was that. Perusing the Guardian‘s coverage, one cannot avoid the conclusion that its chief concern was to cast doubt on the allegations and to underscore that, whether they were true or not, mainstream Muslim leaders like Bunglawala are, of course, utterly opposed to such shady subterfuges. There was no mention that Bunglawala, this supposed stalwart of “Muslim engagement in British society,” had in fact called Osama bin Laden a “freedom fighter” and Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman “courageous”; no mention that he’d passionately campaigned to get Yusuf al-Qaradawi a British visa; no mention that, in addition to being head of Muslims4UK, he’s the longtime media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, the same group of which Alam is a leading member. In short, Bungalawala’s brand of “engagement in British society” is not really significantly different from that of the Birmingham conspirators. By pretending that there exists appreciable ideological distance between the likes of Bunglawala and Birmingham’s Trojan Horses, the Guardian isn’t just misleading its readers – it’s participating itself in the whole nefarious ruse to which these creeps are committed. But what else is new?